Start your students off right by teaching them effective reading strategies with these bookmarks.

Download the bookmarks here to hand out to your students. They will remind kids how to read in another language: Just keep reading. Too many language learners stop to look up every unknown word. Terrible strategy. As long as you know most of the words on the page, it is better to just keep on reading.

I handed out Reading Reminder Bookmarks like this for more than 30 years in my Spanish classes. They really helped students to focus on reading for meaning. We need to train students to just keep reading instead of stopping all the time to look up unknown words—that’s not reading. Stopping too often is slowly and painfully decoding. It interrupts the flow and breaks concentration.

The big idea here is to get students to self-select materials that they can mostly read fluently without looking u[ words too much. This will get them to self-differentiate their reading materials—that’s when extensive reading takes off and the acquisition skyrockets.

We want our students to avoid this syndrome:

“The use of authentic texts with learners often has an effect opposite to that intended: instead of helping the reader to read for the meaning of the message, an authentic text at too difficult of a level of language forces the reader to focus on the code.”

―Eddie Williams (1983). Communicative Reading. In K. Johnson and D. Porter (Eds.), Perspectives in Communicative Language Teaching, p. 175

Coach your students and give them experience with different levels of text until they get the feeling of what it’s like to read for meaning.